Simon Blackburn

Simon Blackburn re-joined our faculty in the Fall 2008 and will be with us one semester each year. In addition to his position here, Blackburn is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He specializing in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of psychology.

Blackburn is the author of many books, including, Spreading the Word (1984); Essay in Quasi-Realism (1993); The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (1994); Ruling Passions (1998); Truth (Co-edited with Keith Simmons, 1999); Think (1999); Being Good (2001); Lust (2004); Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed (2005); Plato’s Republic (2006); and most recently, How to Read Hume (2008). He has written extensively on metaethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, metaphysics, and the history of philosophy. Some publications include: “The Individual Strikes Back,” Synthese (1984); “Error and the Phenomenology of Value,”in Ethics and Objectivity, ed. by Honderich (1985); “Truth, Realism and the Regulation of Theory,” Midwest Studies (1988); “How To Be An Ethical Anti-Realist,” Midwest Studies (1988); “Values and Attitudes,” Ethics (1988); “Hume and Thick Connections,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (1990); “Just Causes,” Philosophical Studies(1991); “Hume on the Mezzanine Level,” Hume Studies (1993); “Circles, Finks, Smells and Biconditionals,” Philosophical Perspectives (1993); “Practical Tortoise Raising,” Mind (1995); “Wittgenstein, Wright, Rorty and Minimalism,” Mind (1998); “Is Objective Moral Justification Possible on a Quasi-realist Foundation,” Inquiry (1999); “Normativity a la Mode,”Journal of Ethics (2001); “Realism: Deconstructing the Debate,” Ratio(2002); “Fiction and Conviction,” Philosophical Papers (2003); “Knowledge, Truth, and Reliability,” Studies in the Philosophy of Logic and Knowledge (2004); “Quasi-Realism No Fictionalism” in Fictionalism in Metaphysics, Kalderon, ed. by Eli (2005); “Antirealist Expressivism and Quasi-Realism” in The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, ed. by Copp (2006); “Must We Weep for Sentimentalism?” in Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory, ed. by Dreier (2006); “The Semantics of Non-Factualism, Non-Cognitivism, and Quasi-Realism” in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language, ed. by Devitt (2006).